I started my internship at Winrock Moldova last week and I haven't really written anything about the work I'm doing yet so I think it's time for that. Winrock International is an American organization that has offices all over the world. I'm working on GTIP (Transnistrian Women's Support Program), which is funded by the US State Department, and right now I'm also helping out with anything else that comes up in the office. I'll be helping with monitoring the activities that are going on at our two resource centers in Transnistria, which include trainings on trafficking awareness and entreprenurial skills among other things, plus they offer free psychological and legal counseling and a crisis hotline. I'll also be translating some documents from English into Russian and vice versa. I translated some questions to send to the resource centers from English to Russian today and it was pretty difficult actually because of the terminology used, but I think it will get easier if I do it more often. I'm also reviewing the new proposal to extend the project for two more years and was brainstorming some new ways to raise awareness about domestic violence and human trafficking. They aren't making use of social networking sites at all so far and I think that could be a really useful way to attract attention to these issues. I visited one of my co-workers at home and met her teenage daughter who spends all her time on the internet. She has Facebook and also odnaklassnitsa which is a Russian site. I checked kontakte, which is the primary Russian version of Facebook, and there are probably 100,000 young people from Transnistria on that website from the quick calculations I made. I think if Winrock made an official group on each of these sites and invited people to join, then posted the anti-trafficking videos they've made and other information on those pages they would get a lot of views. So I'll probably suggest that and see what my co-workers think.
Like I mentioned above, I got to visit one of my co-workers (Raisa) at home last night. She has invited me to live with her and her daughter to help them learn English, and I think I'm going to take her up on that offer. Georgeta, the leader of the GTIP program, came over as well with her 3 year old daugther and we all had dinner together. I was a bit nervous when she said she was making fish because I usually say I have an allergy to fish to avoid it, but I decided to try it and it was actually really good with all the vegetables to kind of disguise the fishiness. So yeah that was actually the first time in my life that I've eaten fish I believe.
The best part of living with a host would be learning more about Moldovan traditions and getting practice with both Russian and Romanian. At dinner they already filled me in on a few things. For example, if someone spills a drink (especially on holidays), it means your dead relatives want some too. We also had some homemade wine which is very popular here. Another topic of dinner conversation was whether or not I'm trying to find a Moldovan husband. I knew that question was going to come at some point, but I didn't really answer. They asked me what I think of their men and I said that they seem to be good looking and they were like "Yeah...yep they're handsome but that's about it." Daniela, the 3-year-old, was adorable. Raisa told her that she would get a surprise after dinner and it turned out to be gummy bears, which she called "jelly bones." Georgeta thought that was what they were too so they were both laughing and saying "ooo jelly bones, jelly bones" over and over again and it was so cute that I couldn't correct them.
So that's what's been going on with me and the Winrock crew. Tonight I had a really good conversation over dinner with a couple of ladies from the Soros Foundation but I'll save that for tomorrow.
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